Of Human Heritage

  Wade Hampton

  Old Pendennis lay on his side, breathing heavily, trying to ease the pain in his good leg. He hitched his burned and scarred left arm, a jointed broomstick with a twisted tuft of stiffened fingers, to touch the scarred side of his face, wondering if his smile was real or a tortured horror.

  “You’re going home, my children,” he said. “To earth.”

  Charleen, his granddaughter—or was she great granddaughter?—held his good hand, patting it softly. “You’re going, too, Grandsire.”

  He tried to see her face but there was a veil, gray and amorphous, between. His eyes did that, sometimes. Clouded over with film. Often he could think it away, sometimes wipe it away with a handkerchief. But not today. He was too tired, too utterly weary with the act of dying.

  It shouldn’t be so hard to die, catching at shallow breaths, wincing at pain, moving heavily to ease cramped muscles. Death should have dignity and peace, not be a querulous round of petty inconveniences. Now, what had he been saying? See, even the mind fumbles. Oh, yes. “You’re going back to Earth. Someday. Eventually they’ll hear our signal. And you’ll go home again.”

  Charleen squeezed his hand gently. “Not without you.”

  Old Pendennis feebly returned the pressure. “Of course, darling. A bit of me will go with each of you. You must remember that. It is part of our faith, our heritage.”

  The scarred, burned half of his face ached with the effort to smile. “But I’ll be gone. Not completely gone, for there’ll be something of me in each of you. It’s time I go, Charleen. I’m old. Very old.” He drew a shuddering breath. “How old am I, Evan? That is Evan, isn’t it?”

  “I’m Charles, Grandfather. Edward’s boy. I think you’re a hundred and ten. If the calendar is right. Father was never sure Jerry got the coordinates correct.”

  “Near enough… A hundred and ten years?.. That’s a long time.”

  “You’re the last of the Old Ones, Grandfather.”

  Old Pendennis smiled into his personal darkness. “A hundred and ten?” He started a chuckle but it hurt his chest. He lay back, content, for the moment just to breathe. “There was a time, Charles, when you couldn’t have got odds I’d live to be twenty. Just after the ship reactor blew up. Radiation burns…” He tried to remember the agony and couldn’t. Perhaps it was just as well that we’re shielded from the past, can’t carry with us its vivid horrors, just its scars. “I was one of the lucky ones.”

  He wondered briefly at that. Would you call it lucky to be lost in the heavens, on some uncharted planet, a leg, an arm and half a face charred and agonizing? Or would it have been better to go in that millesecond of holocaust? A thousand had gone then. Ninety-seven, burned, screaming with pain and terror, had made the life rocket and, eventually, this lonely planet. Seventy-two of them had survived, after a fashion, twenty or more as hopeless cripples.

  “We saved all we could. Even the cripples, Charles, though it would have been so easy to let them die. Possibly even merciful. And certainly better for us. But we are humans. With an immense respect for human life. That’s your heritage. You, Charles, Charleen, Natalie…” He turned milk-blue eyes up to the dimly seen figure. “Who’s here, Charles?”

  “All of us, Grandfather. The whole colony, except for Evan and Walter Blake. They’re at the radio, to keep the beacon steady.”

  “The whole colony?” He swept blank, unseeing eyes around the big room in slow, uneasy jerks. “How many?”

  “Two hundred and four, counting Mabel’s new twins.”

  “I haven’t seen them, have I?”

  “No, Grandfather, but they’re healthy rascals, to hear them squeal.”

  “New life. As mine goes out.”

  “Don’t talk like that!” Charleen spoke almost harshly.

  “But it’s a good thing, Charleen. New life. Continuity. Protect it, Charles. That is our human heritage. The continuity of life. Remember that. Hold to it, Charles. All of you…” His voice rose, but probably half of them were not hearing. “You are human. You are Earthmen though you’ve never seen Earth. You are men, not animals, as it would have been easy to become on this planet.

  “It has been a good planet, and we have survived. The hardest part of our survival has been to remain human beings, conscious, thinking human beings. It would have been so easy…” Old Pendennis sank back, remembering distantly, veiled with years, hidden under other memories.

  With so much pain and death around, it would have been so much simpler to let the cripples die in their misery, or even kill them. That might have solved many problems. Food was scarce and unfamiliar on this new world. There had been so little. And too much pain. Everyone, burned, scarred, battered, yet they had held on to human dignity, somehow. And to the dream of returning to earth.

  He could remember the middle years better. The crude houses, plows made from scraps of the ship, and some large man with half a beard on a burned face and the stump of a leg, exhorting them, driving them. And they had held on, dreaming of a return to Earth. Perhaps that had held them even more than just a tenacious clinging to life. After all, even animals had that.

  Their descendants would go back to Earth, taking with them something of the others so that, in a sense, even the Old Ones would go home, if a ship could find them. But, if it didn’t?

  “This is not a bad planet. In some ways it is better than Earth. Less crowded.” He almost laughed at that, the effort shaking his chest. Two hundred and four humans were the entire population of a planet. “So, even if rescue should never come, you can have a good life here so long as you remember you’re human.”

  They were stirring restlessly. Old Pendennis could hear the sussuration of movement, here, there, small pockets of impatience. Probably the children.

  He tried to sit up and failed. Charleen’s arm eased him back down. “Rest, Grandsire.”

  “I have a long time for that, my dear, and only moments for this. Charles? You’re still here?”

  “Yes, Grandfather.”

  “Don’t grieve for me. Because there will always be something of me in each of you, as there is something of all the others in me. A little bit of me, and of all the Old Ones, can go back with you. Or stay here forever.” Old Pendennis lay back, his voice suddenly, for one last moment, clear and firm. “Remember your heritage. Remember! You are human.”

  Charleen closed his rheumy eyes with one hand. With the other she pulled up the blanket while her tail gently straightened his feet, the good one on top. Charles got his hind legs under him with a little clatter and stood with bowed head, two of his eyes closed, the other pair watching for the antics of the children. Myrtle was keeping her youngest quiet by scratching gently, soothingly at both its heads, and Judy’s third arm was rocking young Peter’s tank where he slept, his gills scarcely moving. Evan came slithering across the floors, his front flippers clearing a way between the children. Evan’s youngest threw her four skinny legs across his scaly hump and screamed in his ear.

  “Do we eat him now, or wait till after the funeral?”

 

 

  Wade Hampton, Of Human Heritage

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